Thursday, December 29, 2016

Yesterday there was drama, excitement and danger. It. Was. Awesome.Yesterday was December 28. It was sunny and an unseasonable 65 degrees. Blue, Violet and I slept late while G got up early and went to work. If you're new here, my job during summer and winter break is to keep the kids alive. So yesterday I did my morning routine and while I was having a wonderful coffee at breakfast I realized that it would be a sin to waste such a beautiful day sitting inside. Winter is coming, I can feel it, and a day like this may not come around again until spring. The kids were apparently ready for an adventure so they started on picnic lunches and water bottles while I loaded up the kayaks. It was beautiful out on the water. I was in shorts and a tshirt. I forgot my sweatshirt, but luckily I didn't need it. I had the kids dressed a little more appropriately (again, my job is to keep them alive). From the shore we set out across the way to an island. It's some sort of protected land owned by the state and with the lake level low for winter, there was a lot of exposed shoreline to explore. We paddled to one side to get a good look and as Blue was pointing out something he spied from his boat, he pointed too hard and leaned too far and his boat tipped. His panic tipped it further, water rushed inside and in a blink, he was neck deep in the lake. His life jacket kept him up so far that it took him a moment to realize he could touch the bottom but once he did, he ran to the shore. I'm sure his life flashed before his eyes. I may have mentioned that it was December 28. While the day was warm, the lake water was decidedly not warm. So how was that awesome? It seems like Blue asks me that a lot when we have these types of experiences. And it's funny how things have changed in that regard. When he was born my life was all about keeping him alive. We covered all the electrical outlets with little plastic things. We moved furniture with sharp corners so it wouldn't be in his path. Cleaning products were moved up high and we even put those little plastic locks on all the cabinets. He couldn't go outside if it was too hot or too cold. We bathed him in Lysol and GermX. We protected him from every physical, emotional and mental danger we could possibly imagine. We had a creek that cut across our yard when I was a kid. At some point it was piped underground but when I was around 10 the pipes under the driveway gave way and had to be replaced. These things happened slowly as work like this was often traded as favors and had to happen to fit someone else's work schedule. Early on a backhoe came by on a slow day and dug up the entire path across the driveway and removed the pipes. Dirt was piled head high on both sides of the creek. These two completely awesome "ramps" were conveniently located at the low spot on the driveway. We had a downhill run and visions of Evel Knievel in our heads. One afternoon my older brothers and I were jumping our little Grand Canyon on our bikes and some stranger lady pulled in the driveway. She drove around the little detour and knocked on the door to our house. She then informed my parents that we were all about to kill ourselves jumping over that pit in our driveway. Of course, we did this just about every day so mom and dad shrugged it off and sent her on her way. My parents protected us. They made sure we were safe. But they also allowed us to live and explore and have adventures. We dug giant holes. We cut down trees with hatchets. We got cuts and scrapes and probably a few concussions, but we didn't know what those were so it's ok. All those adventures helped to teach us how to live and how to be people. I realize this is not a newsflash to most of you but we are raising generations of children who think an adventure is something you play on an XBox. Excitement is only something they feel when there's a new season of their favorite show released on Netflix. They survive on carbonated sugar drinks and Cheetos. And all this because their parents have hovered and tried to protect them from all sorts of dangers. So they sit inside and breath processed air and they whine incessantly when the temperature varies one degree in either direction. They don't know what it's like to go exploring in the woods. They never play in the mud. They never experience any kid-friendly "danger".So when they grow up into teens and 20somethings they are pasty, unhealthy, scared of everything and they don't know how to deal with real excitement or challenges because their parents aren't there to hover and fix it anymore. In their book "The Dangerous Book For Boys", Conn and Hal Iggulden write, "In this age of video games and cell phones, there must still be a place for knots, tree houses, and stories of incredible courage." Yes, there must be.

Yesterday Blue caught his breath on the shore. He was truly terrified by the cold and unexpected swim. We stood in the sun as he dripped dry and then we walked the shoreline and found cool treasures. He started making jokes about being wet and falling out of his boat. Then he got back in his kayak and paddled himself across the lake like a dude who just punched a dragon in the face.It was awesome. (If you have kids or if you plan to have kids ever, buy "The Dangerous Book For Boys". Read it and do some of the cool stuff with your kids. It's totally safe for girls too.)

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

I teach studio art classes at a liberal arts university. This, of course, provides me with a particular way of thinking about the purpose of higher education. But I'm also a parent. And that provides me with a new way of thinking about the purpose of higher education. Each year at university recruiting events I'll have parents ask me if their children will be able to find a job if they get an art degree. The idea of the starving artist has been perpetuated to the point of making a 4 year degree in studio art seem laughable to some.

I completely understand how illogical an art degree can seem to a non-creative parent. They see the world through their eyes and their experience. But their skepticism about the possibility of artistic careers filters down to their children so that even the most talented young artist must wonder if they can pay a mortgage with their art degree.

Life is about so much more than your job.

I've had enough students and parents ask me serious questions about art related careers lately, that it feels important to share something with you. This semester I sent an email to my upper level students to perhaps pry one eye open about the possibilities of their degrees. That email is copied below. Perhaps it may help you see your world a little differently...

Dear Art Student,

Some of you have a general idea of where you want
to head after school. Some of you have no idea. Some of you have
dreams that deep down you kinda sorta think will never happen. Some of
you are worried about not getting an art job or not using your 4 year degree.

Here’s some blanket advice for you: Do what
you love.

If that’s art related, awesome. If it’s in
another field altogether, awesome. But why on Earth would you choose to
willingly work 40+ hours each week doing something that bores you? Why
limit yourself to only enjoying life on weekends? That’s just dumb and
life is too short for that nonsense.

People these days are so concerned with getting
jobs and careers and they are using college as a means to that end. You
did not choose to go to a vocational or technical school. You chose a
university education…and one at a liberal arts college. The purpose of a
liberal arts education is to teach you how to think and how to be a good and
useful human while appreciating the beauty around you. Sure, you may get some
experiences and tips along the way to make you more desirable to a particular
vocational field, but what you are learning has a much more broad application
than just a “major”.

And creative people like you are perhaps even
better prepared for the broad job market than any other students. You
learn how to critically analyze a given situation and locate problems.
You learn to plan ahead and anticipate potential problems before they
even exist. You learn to use unorthodox and creative solutions to solve
those problems. You learn how to create things that did not formerly
exist in the world. You learn how to truly see the world around you and
you learn how to interact with that world and how to show parts of that world
to others.That is the very recipe for a
perfect employee.

Forget this crap you’ve been sold about wasting
your time and money being an art major. And shame on anyone who has
insinuated or flat out told you this.You
will all leave here with a degree experience that makes you much more useful
and valuable to employers and to society than any other major on campus.

So stop feeling pressure. Stop feeling
anxious about what you might do for the rest of your life. Give some
thought to your dreams. Give some thought to what makes you happy and how
you might give back what you have learned to those less fortunate souls around
you who did not have the ability to be art majors. As you plan your
future, plan to do what you love doing. Plan to live a life even better
than what you have dreamed. And when you walk across that stage at
graduation, every single step you take after shaking the president’s hand
should advance you in the direction of your dreams.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Last summer was great. It was the Summer of Waterfalls. And really, how can you top that?

This summer I entertained lots of ideas. The summer of treehouses. The summer of beaches. The summer of sitting around in your underwear and watching tv.

Eventually the summer named itself. This summer was the Summer of Accidental Adventures.

What does this mean? Simply put, it meant saying "Sure!" to almost everything. Not sure you understand? Here, let me explain in photos....

Would you like to try on some of our masks for the parade down main street? Sure.

What about you young lady? Sure.

Can we rent a kayak and explore the inlet? Sure.

That was really fun, can we get our own kayak? Sure.

Admittedly, much of the summer was spent in the kayaks on Lake Greenwood. Blue graduated into my single kayak and Violet and I took the new tandem. One of the perks of accidental adventures is that there's no real planning involved. We'd wake up, make waffles and while devouring them I'd ask the kids what they wanted to do that day. If they said kayak, we'd tie the 'yaks down and drive to the lake. If they said have a lazy day, we'd sit in our underwear all day.

Of course every day can't be adventure day. There were plenty of sculpture work days in the basement and those porch rails had not been painted in 5 years. I suppose that was an adventure too, just not a particularly enjoyable one.

And there were always cool new things to see on our adventures.

And when it's 500 degrees out, any sort of shade is a good place to relax.

Little Miss Independence jumped at the chance to take Blue's paddle from him so she could "drive". Blue would tie up to our boat and let us pull him.

Fireworks? Sure.

Because who doesn't love sparklers?

Ginger invited us up to Lake Lure one day to hang out. Sure.

The kids got to swim in the lake with Scarlett.

They seemed to love it.

Blue even had a quick nap.

And who can complain when your view looks like this?

The public sculpture project in Columbia was also an accidental adventure. The kids had to tag along on our trips to take care of business there. When we installed the anchor system, some punk kids came by and scratched their names in the concrete. Vandals.

Since we were in Columbia, we took a little hike along the river.

Chick Fil A had their dress like a cow day. You dress like a cow and you get free sandwiches. We found this out at breakfast and the answer was, sure. Our plans for the day included making cow shirts and horns. Oh, and eating a free lunch.

Some students invited us on a hike. Sure.

We went to Brevard and hit Moore Cove Falls.

Then stopped by Looking Glass Falls.

In the middle of our week in St. Augustine, we thought, why not drive to Orlando and check out Disney Springs? Sure.

And on the way home, you wanna stop by Savannah to walk around and eat lunch? Sure.

What's indoor rock climbing? Can we do it? Sure.

jon was kind enough to let us use his lake place to launch the kayaks.

We had a good day of paddling before being chased away by a storm.

One afternoon we found a BBQ joint out in the middle of nowhere. On the way home we saw a little parking area beside the river and we swerved in to check it out. It turned out to be a very cool place.

One of the best tasting accidental adventures was our discovery of organic and real fruit popsicles. We first discovered them at The Hyppo in St. Augustine but we found one closer to home in Greenville called King of Pops.

We had summer art hike after a lot of rain which made the stream crossings pretty wet.

But it was a lot of fun.

We stopped in Tryon to play piano with Nina Simone. Blue showed her how to use the foot for that extra little something.

Blue went to Sky Zone with a friend and told us how cool the ninja course was.

So of course we had to check that out too.

We ended the summer right before the kids went back to school with an impromptu trip to Charleston for the day.

We ate at Nicks BBQ and walked around a little. When we came to St. Philip's I noticed a little sign that said to use the other door. I took this as an invitation to go inside. All my life I've taken photos of this church, the steeple and the graveyard but never once thought to go inside. So we opened the huge door and walked in where we were greeted by the pastor. He offered us water and let us look around while he attended to some things. Photos do not do justice to the beautiful and historic interior space. It really felt like church in there. I recommend it.

After some afternoon beach time, we pulled up to the counter at Paige's Okra Grill and stuffed ourselves before officially ending our summer.

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

OK, if you’ve seen me accidentally blow something up
or stand on a rolling, spinning office chair to reach something high, you may
disagree with that.Heck, I’ll be the
first to tell you that sometimes I do some boneheaded things with comedic
results, but in all seriousness…I am not an idiot.

To the contrary, I’m actually a fairly well educated
person with good common sense, excellent creative problem solving skills and an
IQ test score that simply must have been a mistake.(Lucky guesses on a lot of the questions.)Even so, if you and I have differing opinions
on any given topic, you may want to think I’m an idiot.

As a professor I spend my days with humans half my
age who are just dipping their toes into the pool of adulthood for the first
time.Generally speaking, these students
find themselves making their own choices about life, morals and values without
the direction of their parents for the first time ever.I’ll admit it’s entertaining to watch them
become so passionate about tattoos, politics and spirituality.They’ll be loud about it in class as well as
in their personal time and with relatively no life experience at this point,
they’ll even be quick to mock and ridicule the people around them with
different views.I’ve had 20 year olds
who looked down on my intelligence level when they found out I had strong
Christian spiritual beliefs.They just
couldn’t believe that I could be so naïve!I smiled as they sat there so above it all knowing full well they had
never been put in a situation where they had to exercise real faith in
anything.It gives me hope to know this
is the beginning of their journey instead of the end.I guess if adolescence teaches us anything
it’s that the growing process is not always a pretty one.

I’m not sure if it’s modern culture or if it’s more
of an American thing but many of us have lost our ability to disagree with one
another and still have an intelligent discourse.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle, Metaphysics

It
used to be the case that people would go to college not to get a job or find a
career, but to learn how to think.College was the place where young adults learned how to engage in the
discovery of new ideas.Students were
encouraged to investigate observations and facts so that ideas and opinions
could be formed.Entertaining questions
and investigating opposing concepts was an active part of education.In a time when so many people go to college,
modern society is apparently filled with very uneducated minds, at least
according to Aristotle.

I
blame TV.Everything from prime time
programming to the local news is designed to evoke an emotional response from
viewers.We tune in and find ourselves
being asked to take sides.We pull for
sitcom characters as they bumble through the story.We are lured into wanting a particular
contestant to win on a goofy talent show because we are shown their emotional
backstory and now we don’t care if they are really the most talented performer,
their story was compelling so we call and vote for them anyway.If you think about what happens to us on this
level, perhaps it’s easier to see how we are manipulated by producers and
programmers.If, on a show based on talent,
we are compelled by the story to pull for a contestant who is not the most
talented….maybe you can see how the news media might use the same tactics to
evoke an emotional response from us regarding local or national issues?With the right angle and the right quotes,
the issue becomes less about the truth and more about the way the story is
told.And when we’re told on a more
national level that we must choose sides between two less than desirable
options, we may get caught up in the stories being told and forget that we have
very specific, individualized values that are not represented by either
available choice.We end up joining a
team that doesn’t really characterize what we believe.

Maybe
it’s not just TV.Maybe we share the
blame.

These
days it seems we raise our human offspring to be mental robots.As parents, we want our children to be
obedient.We want them to be like
us.And because we do not feel confident
in our reasoning or our decision-making, we certainly do not want our kids asking
us questions about how we arrived at our decisions.That would be embarrassing, right?If a kid simply asked why we held to a
certain moral value and we couldn’t articulate it with a logical argument based
in fact, we would look dumb.We just
can’t have that, so let’s not encourage questions from our kids and if they do
happen to ask a good question, let’s just say “because that’s the way it is”
and move on.Because if our kids start
to ask questions and think for themselves they might grow up to have different
opinions than us.And since we tend to
think of different as bad, we cant let that happen.So if our children fall in line, they mimic
our values and beliefs not based on careful consideration and experiential
learning, but because that’s what someone told them once.

What
kind of adult does that child become?I
think a quick glance across traffic will answer that for you.The car in front of you will have a political
endorsement sticker.But that sticker
will not just support one candidate, it will simultaneously insult another
candidate.As if to say, “only a
complete idiot could support that person”.The car beside you will have a religious sticker.But that sticker will be carefully worded to
not just support a particular faith, but to also use guilt or pressure or even
political parties to back that faith.And don’t even get me started on the college football goofballs who sit
at the ready at a red light to give the finger to the person in front of them
with the opposing local team sticker on their car.You like Clemson football?You must have a low IQ.Because one of those things has to do with
the other, right?

Trivial
things like football teams, temporary things like politics and important things
like core values all come down to personal belief.When I believe that the Cubs are my favorite
baseball team, I am saying that I have chosen to support this team.I am not saying they are the best team in
baseball on any given day/year (/century as far as the Cubs are concerned).All I am saying is that for fairly
unimportant reasons that are totally unrelated to rational thought, I choose to
hope this team wins.This does not make
me intelligent.This also does not make
me unintelligent.It is a choice I have
made and it reflects only a portion of who and what I am as a human.At the same time, if you choose to hope the
Yankees win, that choice does not mean you are a bad person.It does not give me any indication of your
intelligence level and it does not mean that we cant be friends.

But
what if you’re one of those Republicans?Or even a Democrat?The same
facts apply.We should be able to have a
conversation and identify aspects of our belief system that line up with a
particular candidate’s platform without getting into an argument, accusing each
other of being dumb or comparing people to Hitler.

Intelligent
discourse and discussion of ideas is not easy.It requires observation and careful gathering of facts.Think of these as the ingredients for a
recipe.A cook will gather the
ingredients first, carefully measure out each one and compare the recipe to
their own tastes, experience and current needs.The cook may then follow the recipe or make adjustments for taste and or
quantity.The ingredients (or facts) must
come first.Then they can be combined
according to the directions to create the meal (or opinion).Gathering the right ingredients can be a
hassle.I know people who are quick to
make substitutions for ingredients they may not have.Some people just use off brands or lesser
quality ingredients than the recipe desires.Others will leave out things they don’t like or they’ll cut the sugar or
use low fat substitutes.When we think
of gathering the facts some of us will allow technology to make us lazy.We’re already on Facebook anyway, so why not
just rely on what we see there as our factual information?That inflammatory headline that links to an
article about that terrible candidate?Heck, I don’t even need to click on that one.I’ll just read the headline and file it away
with my “facts” about that person.I’ll
also wonder how anyone could justify voting for someone who kicks puppies like
the article said.Now you’ve used two
cups of saccharine instead of two cups of sugar.Your cookies are going to taste
terrible.Facebook, internet articles,
things we hear people say, these are all substitutes for real facts.These are all things that prevent us from
having intelligent discourse with those who may have different opinions.

Fact
checking is hard.Name calling is
easy.

It’s
also very easy to just put on someone else’s beliefs and wear them as your
own.That requires much less cranial
effort than investigating different ideas, researching facts through reliable
sources and synthesizing that information into your own beliefs.But you are not Fox News.You are not CNN.You are not the very opinionated dude on talk
radio and you are NOT Kanye West.You
are a human who was raised with a very specific set of values and beliefs acted
out around you as you grew through your younger years.You are a human who then grew old enough to
ask questions and began to figure some things out for yourself.You are a human who grew into an adult who is
expected to have their own set of values and beliefs based on a mixture of all
that history, research and that ever-important element:life experience.With all that very individual history mixed
up together, there’s just no way your values and beliefs line up exactly with
anyone else’s.You can’t cut and paste
your beliefs.

You
may also wish to consider the very real possibility that you may eventually
change your mind about something.I know
it seems so unlikely when you have such passionate allegiance to your ideas
right now.But that’s what life does to
us; it changes us.Remember, at one
point in human history we were certain that the sun revolved around the
Earth.We were also certain that the
Earth was flat.Heck, not so long ago
some of the greatest medical minds were convinced that if you were feeling bad
they just needed to cut you open and let you bleed out all the bad stuff.

From
this side of these archaic ideas, they seem silly to us.In the same way, at some point in your life
you will look back at what you believed in 2016 and you’ll laugh at how naïve
you were.You’ll discover that those
people you thought were idiots because of their beliefs are now your
friends.And they’ll seem a whole lot
wiser then.

We’re
not going to agree on everything.Ever.Perhaps though, we could
decide to agree on this one thing:Let’s
agree to respect disagreement.Different
is not bad.Different is not dumb.Different is just different.And as I told my 10 year old last week, if
everyone was exactly alike this world would be a very boring place.